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A pairing-free certificate-based key-insulated aggregate signature scheme for wireless medical sensor networks

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Abstract

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) realize remote monitoring of patients’ health status through the combination of medical sensors and wireless communication. There is an urgent need to ensure the integrity, authenticity, authentication, and privacy of patients’ medical data and improve treatment outcomes. Currently, many aggregate signature schemes have been developed to protect patients’ medical data in WMSNs. Among them, the pairing operation and key exposure in some aggregate signature schemes can raise efficiency and security issues in medical data transmission, and some of them do not achieve equivalent security, which leads to healthcare professionals receiving inaccurate medical data. Aiming at these, this paper proposes a pairing-free certificate-based key-insulated aggregate signature scheme (CB-KIAS) in WMSNs, which introduces key-insulated technique that can effectively avoid the problem of key exposure. According to formal security proof, this scheme is unforgeable against adaptive-chosen message attacks and having the equivalent security of aggregate signature to ensure that the validity of the aggregate signature is equal to the validities of all single signatures to resist fully chosen-key attacks. The proposed CB-KIAS scheme, utilizing elliptic curves and the combination of online/offline cryptography mechanism, is effective and more suitable for resource-constrained medical sensors when compared with other related schemes.

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Funding

This study was supported by the Open Fund of Advanced Cryptography and System Security Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province (Grant No. SKLACSS-202311), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1936213, 62372285), and Shanghai Rising-Star Program (22QA1403800).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Min Liu, Liangliang Wang & Kai Zhang

  2. Advanced Cryptography and System Security Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Chengdu, 610225, China

    Liangliang Wang

  3. School of Electronic Information and Electrica Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Yu Long

  4. School of Cyberspace Security, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunication, Xi’an, 710121, China

    Baodong Qin

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  1. Min Liu
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  2. Liangliang Wang
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Contributions

Min Liu wrote the main manuscript text. Liangliang Wang, Kai Zhang, Yu Long, Baodong Qin assisted in the analysis and conducted constructive discussions. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liangliang Wang.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection: Special Issue on 2 - Track on Security and Privacy

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Liu, M., Wang, L., Zhang, K. et al. A pairing-free certificate-based key-insulated aggregate signature scheme for wireless medical sensor networks. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 17, 685–700 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01610-w

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